“But you have to be very cautious when the bears are around,” he says.

Not only were three bears around, two of them, cubs, broke into a neighbor’s house and couldn’t get out of the bathroom. Their mother paced outside the house.

“Unfortunately, a window was open and I guess Anita forgot to close it,” says Nieman, about the home’s owner. She did not want to talk to us.

“Here, the mother is moving toward the edge of our property,” says Nieman, in photos he shot of the mother bear and one cub, after police scooted the cubs out of the neighbor’s front door.

But one cub went in one direction--the second in another.

“It’s obvious she’s in great distress she has not found the other one,” he says about one picture.

But it meant one cub was still on its own—looking for mom.

“Right now, we are in a very dangerous situation, so we have alerted all the neighbors, that there is a mother and one cub searching for the other cub. And that is about as dangerous as it can get,” he says.

It means they go into lockdown, of sorts.

“All of us have probably brought in most of our feeders and closed our doors, and are on high alert right now,” says Nieman.

They’re on high alert because they don’t want to be the one standing in between a protective mama bear and her vulnerable babies.

“Yes, there’s a safety issue. But I’d hate to see that cub die because it did not find its mother. It probably would not survive for very long,” he says.

But this story has a happy ending. As we left the Rockwood neighborhood, we saw the mother reunited with her two cubs. But we spooked them and they ran into the wilderness together.